The wait is finally over: the new QGIS 2.8 “Wien” has finally been released for MacOS as well! Following the (kind of) tradition of my articles showing how to install QGIS 2.62.4, and 2.0 on MacOS, I now sat down to write a brief walkthrough for the latest version as well.

It’s been awfully quiet here on the blog recently. This is owed to some major changes in my life, including the successful end of my PhD program, a successful job hunt, a move from Japan to Germany, and an interesting yet challenging start in my new job at a major German research institute.

But the recent release of MacOS 10.10 “Yosemite” together with the even more recent release of the new QGIS 2.6 “Brighton” was a brilliant opportunity to not only bring back some life here, but also to continue my mini-series of articles about installing and running QGIS and other rather scientific software packages on the latest versions of MacOS (see here, here, and here for example).

So I sat down on my freshly delivered sofa between unpacked boxes to try my luck. To make a long story short, in my case the installation ran smoothly and was done in about half an hour – downloading the necessary disk images took most of time. But before I updated my QGIS 2.4 to the new version 2.6 I first tried if 2.4 still runs on my freshly upgraded MacOS Yosemite. And there was a small surprise waiting for me here, as MacOS asked me to update my Java SE 6 runtime!

Updated Java SE 6 runtime necessary

Luckily this was no big deal, since the error message provided a link to the download page at Apple.

Apple provides the Java update

Easy installation of the Java update

After running this update QGIS 2.4 worked fine like before.

For the download of QGIS itself I decided once again for the packages provided by William Kyngesburye a.k.a KyngChaos – not only did I never have any problems with these, but to my best knowledge they are the only available pre-compiled QGIS packages for MacOS… The installation process follows the steps known from earlier releases:

1. GDAL
First is the new GDAL 1.11. The installation is as easy as downloading the DMG and installing GDAL from the respective PKG therein. Please ignore the NumPy package also contained in the GDAL disk image, since it’s an outdated version. Oh ya, and then there’s this thing that’s still annoying me:

That’s still annoying

Gatekeeper refuses to open applications and packages from “unidentified developers” (that is, developers that can’t afford a certificate by Apple) by double-clicking. Hence you need to right-click it and select Open.

2. matplotlib and NumPy
Before we can install matplotlib we need to install NumPy. There you can find the most recent version 1.8.0-1. As is stated on the website NumPy is “included on the GDAL Framework disk image, though it may not be up to date”. And indeed the GDAL image mentioned above includes NumPy 1.6.2-1 from mid-2012…
Now that that’s out of the way we can install matplotlib 1.3.1-2.

3. QGIS
And finally QGIS 2.6.0-1 itself. As in the other cases we open the DMG file and install from the PKG file therein. That’s it!

QGIS 2.6 “Brighton” splash screen

QGIS 2.6 “Brighton” UI on Yosemite

Now that everything was installed it was time to fire it up for the first time. And lo and behold, it works! Just like that. You can’t ask for more. Now it’s time to discover all the great new features QGIS 2.6 brings!

Today I finally found some breathing room in my projects to dare updating my MacBook Pro (running MacOS X 10.9.4 Mavericks) from QGIS 2.0 (Dufour) to the recently released version 2.4 (Chugiak). Well, to be honest I also realized that I should update to be able to use the QgsFeatureRequest.setFilterExpression() method to make use of filtering expressions (introduced in version 2.2).

The first step was to download the installer images for QGIS 2.4 and GDAL 1.11 from KyngChaos.

The GDAL disk image contains not only the complete GDAL framework (including the GEOS, PROJ, SQLite and UnixImageIO frameworks), but also NumPy. Since version 1.6.2-1 is dated from end of August 2012 I decided to skip installing, since I installed my NumPy later than that and should therefore be up to date already. The GDAL installation worked without a problem.

Next step was the installation of the actual QGIS 2.4. The readme files recommend to delete any existing QGIS.app file from the Applications folder, so that’s what I did. The installer then confronted me with this error message: "QGIS requires the Matplotlib python module (kyngchaos build)."

matplotlib python module required

Luckily matplotlib 1.3.1-2 from early 2014 can also be found on the KyngChaos website, so I installed that from the disk image (root authorization necessary) and went back to the QGIS installer. When the installer presented me the readme file once again I realized that I had apparently just read over the hint that not only NumPy but also the matplotlib python module was required – classic user error on my end!

The QGIS installer also requires root authorization, takes few minutes and about half a gigabyte of hard disk space. After the small hickups earlier it finished without a problem, and I was presented first with the beautiful new splash screen and then the GUI itself. Side note: I love the fact that QGIS remembered all my settings regarding toolbars, window locations etc.!

QGIS 2.4 Chugiak splash screen

QGIS 2.4 GUI fresh after installation

Huge thanks and props have to go to the team behind QGIS – I can’t wait to look for reasons to try out all the new features. For a quick overview I can recommend Nyall Dawsons blog, whose most recent blog articles provide both an overview of and also some details about what’s new in QGIS 2.4.

After a hardware failure on my MacBook Pro’s hard disk in the end of last year (replaced for free within half a day at the Apple Store, thanks to my Apple Care Protection Plan) and an extended christmas and new year holiday I’m currently being struck down by a nasty cold and hence decided I have some spare time on my hands to give the latest Mac OS X version 10.9 “Mavericks” a try. It had been released in October, but I had been too busy to play around with it, so far. Obviously I’m not going to screw up my main production machine, the iMac, but instead designated my old, trusted MacBook Pro to be the guinea-pig.

For my research I’m recently doing a lot of graph and network analysis. So far the tools in ESRI ArcGIS have been sufficient for what I was trying to achieve. I used their Network Analyst Extension and also the Urban Network Analysis toolbox by the City Form Lab at the MIT/SUTD for a more scientific application: the calculation of centrality measures. While these warrant some more in-depth articles in themselves, here I’d like to put a more technical focus on a really annoying problem when using Gephi on a more recent MacOS X system.